Mally Francis with her painting of Babington’s Leek (Allium ampeloprasum var.babingtonii) at the RHS Botanical Art Show 2018 (12 July 2018)

Mally Francis - a Timeline in Botanical Art
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She was a particularly lovely person and always very kind. I have known her for well over 30 years. She started botanical painting with me at the Leicester college and became a member of the LSBI. She also attended many of my Summer Schools at Market Overton. She then moved to Cornwall and started teaching but we kept in contact and I have always heard particularly flattering comments about her teaching. I am sure that all who had the privilege of knowing her will miss her
Anne-Marie Evans

The Studio was originally built about 250 years ago as the Sawpit for the Heligan estate when logs were dragged in by a horse and then cut into planks and beams by two men using a pit saw. One above, standing on the log (the top-dog) and the other below in the pit, covered in sweat and sawdust, (the under-dog).
When we bought The Wagon House in 1997 the Sawpit had become a ruin with only two cob walls standing and the brick piers opposite to support the roof.
In 1999 we commenced the restoration and it came into full use as our studio early in 2000. The Sawpit, thirty feet long and six feet deep still remains beneath the floor as a little piece of Heligan history. 
Nowadays, the Sawpit is in full time use again, either for the Botanical Painting classes or as a Photographic Studio. A collection of old saws are attached to the roof beams.

My teaching philosophy is to encourage all students to develop their own skills to the highest level possible. There is never any competition in my classes and everyone can work at their own pace. The courses are always enjoyable and old friends meet each other year after year as they return to continue their studies. Everyone has their own aspirations and it gives me great pleasure to help them to achieve their own goals.
Mally Francis (in Mally Francis Paints the Lost Gardens of Heligan
February 1, 2011 by Tania Marien)

a still from the video about her botanical painting classes at the Wagon House

The Florilegium was the inspiration of Mally Francis FCPGFS, FEPFS who founded the Society in 2000, and was its Chairman from 2001 to 2012. Mally stepped down in January 2012, and was made Honorary Founder Chairman of the Society, and a Fellow of The Linnean Society in recognition of her contributions to world of Botanical Illustration and Botany.
Eden Project Florilegium Society

Angela Lober (Araucaria heterophylla) and the video

The Exhibition
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New Zealand:
​‘Ngāi Tipu Taketake – Indigenous Flora’

Scotland - Flora Scotia
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Dear friends, artists and supporters, please come and join us for a glass of wine on Saturday 31st March at the opening of the Flora Scotia exhibition, John Hope Gateway, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 3.30 - 5.30 pm. We look forward to seeing you there!

Kew Gardens - Australian Flora: three new exhibitions
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The Finnis Scott Foundation Botanical Art Award (£10,000)

discrete projects that promote and encourage the practice and appreciation of botanical painting.

The judges are looking to reward fresh ideas, original projects and new ways of working.

Celebrating a renovated Garden Museum

Pineapple by Lesley Anne Sandford

The Tradescants' Orchard is a contemporary exhibition comprising watercolours by fifty eminent botanical artists is to be staged alongside a display of ‘The Tradescants’ Orchard’, a seventeenth-century volume of sixty-six watercolours depicting fruit varieties that John Tradescant and his son might have grown in their market garden at Lambeth. 

The Tradescants' Orchard
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The Tradescants' Orchard is a practical document that records the size, colour and texture of fruit with their ripening dates.  This is the first time the watercolours from The Tradescants' Orchard have been lent by the Bodleian Libraries to an exhibition outside Oxford.   ​They come from the collection of Elias Ashmole, whose collection founded the Ashmolean museum.

A painting from the collection associated with the Tradescant Orchard

Contemporary paintings of fruit
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Exhibiting artists

Pomegranates on Branch, Punica Granatum by Heidi Venamore

The standard of the plant portraits is so high and the text so illuminating that this  will make a memorable book and exhibition. I do hope that it will also be exhibited in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 2018
Dr. Shirley Sherwood Patron of the Florilegium Society

Cover of "The Florilegium. Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney. Celebrating 200 Years: Plants of the Three Gardens of the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust" published April 2016 © 2015 Foundation & Friends of the Botanic Gardens

The plants are painted life-size, unless noted otherwise on the painting, and most are reproduced at about half painted size. Some show the plant in its entirety, some the flower and fruiting bodies, in others, the focus is that most recognisable and showiest of all structures, the flower, further playing out its biological role in attracting attention.
Beverley Allen - President of the Florilegium Society

The botanical art displayed in this book is definitely at the high end of the spectrum; these are works of incredible accuracy and of undeniable beauty that fully respect the plants they portray,
Dr Brett Summerell (Preface) - Director of the RBGS

Brugmansia x candida by Mayumi Hashi GM - a Japanese artist based in the UK. © 2015 Foundation & Friends of the Botanic Gardens

Dianne Sutherland-Ball (UK) painted the Jade Vine and flew to Sydney to visit the exhibition.

How to get a copy of "The Florilegium"